


Dead Heroes Know No Fear

by Eisenschrott



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Diary/Journal, Gen, POV First Person, Speciesism, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-29
Updated: 2020-12-29
Packaged: 2021-03-11 02:22:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,473
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28407678
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eisenschrott/pseuds/Eisenschrott
Summary: A young Rebel recounts an unexpected meeting on a war-torn planet.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 24





	Dead Heroes Know No Fear

**Taungsday 6, Month 8, 5 ABY, Ord Sigatt**

I abandoned this diary— _again_ ; it is the third break this year but _not_ the longest—during the campaign on Milagro. The cause was an event which had, on my will to write, the same clogging effect as Wookiee hair in the water pipes of a multispecies communal shower. I had no idea how to put it into words, and indeed still have no idea now, so I didn’t want to write, or even think, about it. But not writing and not thinking about it has made it impossible to write and think about anything else. I must have this gangrenous tissue debrided before it poisons me to death, and hope writing is the canister of pain-relieving gas and the bacta bandage, as well as the sonic scalpel.

(Note for posterity: By the power of a ministerial circular holo sent on Centaxday last week, my role has changed official denomination. While the actual work is the same, I and my colleagues unleashed across the manufacturing worlds of the galaxy are not Ministry of Industry Representatives on Mission anymore, I seem to understand, because some rich scaredy-tooka on Coruscant thought it sounded a tad too revolutionary; we have been rebranded as Ministry of Industry Delegate Agents, which I believe sounds bafflingly close to Imperial Security Bureau Agents, and I also believe this is why _certain sentients_ , who deserve to be court-martialed and shot, find it reassuring.)

Sixteen standard days ago, I was attached to a section of the 113rd Mobile Infantry scouting through the north-north-eastern subsector of the SoroSuub Harvester Plant. This subsector had been one of the most heavily shelled areas of the factory; when outside of Lieutenant Kew’s earshot, Sergeant Chiriak dubbed our mission ‘Operation Scavenger’, adding, “Not that there’s much left to scavenge.” The section brought more ground scanners, shovels, pickaxes and empty crates than weapons, all the digging stuff loaded on a utility hovercraft floating in the rear guard. The landscape was a flatland of debris, smelted and broken down to pebbles and glassed to metallic sand. Looking around myself, I stood in the middle of a rippled sea frozen in carbonite. The terrain was still hot after several days since the orbital bombardment like the slopes of a volcano after an eruption, and the debris easily cut through the soles of combat boots. The Alliance never made them sturdy enough, but the dip in quality of recent Imperial production is tangible; a Human recruit was wearing requisitioned stormtrooper boots and a sharp edge of half-molten alloy slashed open the midsole _and_ her right foot underneath. I was not sorry for the kid, an opportunistic local the 113rd took in on its first recruitment drive on Milagro, who had enlisted for the free food and the permission to carry a blaster and now also won a comfortable free ride on the hovercraft, but I was very pleased to see proof of the Empire’s deteriorating industrial capabilities.

These details are useless and I am digressing to delay the unavoidable.

The Imps had camouflaged themselves in a foxhole well hidden among the debris, and ambushed us. I was with Sergeant Chiriak, about twenty meters behind the advance guards, displaying my marvelous skills at walking on debris while reading a composite map on a datapad without slipping. The advance guards with the landmine scanners barely had time to sign us to halt, that they were engulfed in the blast field of a thermal detonator booby-trap. I was reading the map; Chiriak said, “Halt!” and I looked up and heard the blast and a flash of light burned into my eyes. I’m pretty sure I only saw the light; my imagination now insists I also saw a dark body form, for an instant, dissolving into the blast field like the wick in a candle flame. Chiriak yanked me to the ground as she yelled orders over a sudden inferno of blaster fire. Seeing nothing but a white dazzle from the detonator flash, I fell on my back on a hard and sharp bed of metallic junk, and if I hadn’t been wearing a refitted Imp cuirass and helmet a shard would have stabbed me from behind. I checked the dents later and one was a centimeter deep.

I cannot tell for how long the Imps kept us pinned down, few or several minutes that dilated into hours. My back and my neck hurt and I couldn’t reach out with my hands and feel myself up if I was broken or bleeding, let alone unholster my blaster and return fire; the terrain did not offer enough cover and the Imp blast barrage swept the ground. Chiriak’s after-action report went into more details, I think; in mine I only wrote the section was ambushed and we took a prisoner, which forced us to abort the mission. Of the seventeen soldiers in the section, four were killed and six wounded (the rookie with the cut foot was included in the count, I suppose because Chiriak takes pity on hungry people and wanted her to get the WIA indemnity), one severely. My role in the action was to lie down and play dead while volleys of red bolts pinged above my head against a cloudy-white sky.

I was close enough to Chiriak to hear her issue the orders that eventually got the section to break out of entrapment, and I remember hearing the sergeant’s voice, not talking to me, presumably into the comlink. I don’t remember what she said. My Imperial upbringing has made me wonder, more than once, whether she lied to aggrandize her merits in the after-action report. But nobody in the section has complained, not even Shikshtanna and Danil, the soldiers who did most of the work. It was a fine demonstration of why Imperial Human-centrism is a tactical disadvantage. A Wookiee can toss a grenade quite far, and a Terrelian Jango Jumper can leap high and rain fire down on a ground position.

The Imps stopped shooting. Chiriak ordered us to get up, “You too, MinRep.” Moving and breathing made my chest and my spine ache. I wanted to ask her if I was wounded on the back, but the sergeant was busy having all the sentients who could stand fan out towards the foxhole, blasters at the ready. To me, she told to go help the wounded to the hovercraft. The vehicle had been riddled with stray bolts; the fore servo-arms were scorched and crackling, one repulsor sputtered and made the hovercraft bob like a dinghy on the waves, two crates were smashed, the recruit with the cut foot was curled up and crying because she had pissed herself while hiding behind the crates and the heap of digging tools.

Three of the wounded were healthy enough to join the rest in inspecting the foxhole. Two could hobble on their own to the hovercraft; the field medic and I carried the one who couldn’t move, a Mirialan who had been hit in the chest and wheezed at every breath like a comedian imitating Darth Vader in an Alliance propaganda satirical holocast.

I did not need to blather so much about the ambush and the landscape and a bunch of rookie soldiers. Another attempt at delay. I don’t want to think about it. This is stupid and pointless. I was an idiot then, and I am a coward now.

* * *

Yesterday at the market the spaceport locals hold in the bombed-down former Imperial garrison, a Miraluka vendor gave me a bundle of smoking leaves. He said he could ‘sense my anguish’ and this stuff would help. Whatever. Free smoke. Put some in the vaporizer and tried them. Tasted far better than Imperial-issued cigarettes. Feeling calm. Dissociated in a good way. The right state of mind to forgive myself for meandering while I write, and carry on as the undertow sweeps me to unexpected depths. I can always edit later. I need to remember this is a personal diary, I will clean it up only when the war is over and then leave it buried in a drawer so that it will be published posthumously, it is not a poem for the New Aldera Poetry Quarterly. As if those folks will ever publish my garbage anyway. Let’s try again to excise the infection while the anesthesia lasts.

I asked the medic if I could help. As he ripped the soldier’s shirt open and studied the wound, without looking at me he said to open the first aid kit and get lost. I did. The new girl was still sniveling and the noise grated on my nerves, so I went to join the soldiers gathered around the foxhole. They had flung out of it two E-11 blasters and a TL-50 Repeater rifle, which explained the firepower these Imps had managed to pack, and two blast-scorched corpses in stormtrooper armor; they wore mismatched bits, a scout trooper boot and kneepad instead of the standard shin guard on one leg, a black vambrace that was perhaps intended for a death trooper. The soldiers seemed more interested in the foxhole than in stripping the dead Imps of any reusable piece of equipment. Some were laughing, and as I got closer I caught glimpses of motion beyond them, which I couldn’t see clearly with the gaggle in the way. I heard angry, huffing noises, interspersed with Shikshtanna’s growls. Then my father’s voice, “Rebel scum! Quit faffing and kill me already!”

I froze in mid-step, while the soldiers booed and called the Imp murderer and Imp scum and a mounting choir clamored at Sergeant Chiriak to let them blast his brains out.

I broke into a run and pushed my way through the soldiers to the edge of the foxhole. It was about a meter and a half deep, cluttered with the collapsed debris that had camouflaged and fortified it, an open grave or an open poodoo hole barely large enough for its two current occupants squirming against each other—our Wookiee trooper Shikshtanna and a snarling Imp in grimy officer battle gear, no helmet, blood on his forehead. Shikshtanna twisted his arms behind his back with one paw, held him by the back of the tunic collar with the other. I stared down at him and he up at me, and he went still and slack-jawed and wide-eyed. “Zevulon,” my father said like my name was a vibroblade knifing his guts.

Somebody slapped my shoulder, hard, without camaraderie. “Hey, Dawnfire, this Imp knows you?” My father flinched as he heard my mother’s surname. I took a deep breath of death-filled air, reeking of ozone fumes and metal shavings that drowned out the tang of blood, and looked around at the soldiers and at Sergeant Chiriak. “Was any of you at the battle of Hoth? This man is General Maximilian Veers.” I already knew none of the privates had been at Hoth, most had joined up later and a minority had served in Rebel units that weren’t at Echo Base. Chiriak had escaped from a detainment moon a week before the battle, she was too emaciated to fight and her only experience of the battle had been a frantic medevac.

That stopped the howling for the Imp’s blood and started murmuring and confused mutual looks. I don’t remember who called me blind and told me to take a better gander at his rank insignia, “This Huttfucker’s just a captain!” In fact, my father was wearing captain insignia on his cuirass. That remark seemed to pull him out of shock, his face became again a scowl, and he said loud enough for everyone to hear in a hoarse voice that makes me wonder now, had he and his fire team gone without drinking for a while in that dust bowl?, “Zevulon is right. I am _that_ Maximilian Veers, the Butcher of Hoth. I was demoted from my rank, and the reason—” he nodded at me, “ask my traitorous son.”

I don’t go around broadcasting who my father is to everyone in the Rebellion; General Madine himself warned me against it after I was vetted and cleared for service. You never know whose family, friends, entire planetary populace etcetera your greyback relative has massacred, and not everyone takes well to claims that you are different from your murderous ilk. But the tooka was out of the bag now, and Rebel grunts are like Imperial grunts in the sense that showing weakness and hesitation in front of them will spell your doom. While everyone stared at me, I laughed. “They demoted you, the darling model of Army propaganda, Darth Vader’s favorite tauntaun, because I defected? Yeah, that is very much the Imperial thing to do.” Someone beside me guffawed and repeated under his breath, “Vader’s favorite tauntaun.”

Danil bent down on his spindly legs, holding his modified E-11 over his shoulders like a yoke, so that he was at eye level with my father. “Pity I got your stormies but not you. Not that killing a general will give my clan their things and their dead back, but you know—‘twas an Imperial Army general on Terrelia who ordered ‘em deported and their homes burnt.” I wonder if, for my father, that had been like meeting a spirit of the dead, come for the final reckoning; the masks that Terrelian Jango Jumpers wear all their adult life long resemble the fishbone skull-masks Hrönir children wear during the festival of the dead, and I remember one time he came home on a short home leave during that festival and I was wearing one such mask. At any rate, my father just glared at Danil without a word.

Shikshtanna growled a phrase which Murata, a Human soldier who had been a language teacher, translated, “Shik says that if we want she will be delighted to rip his arms and head off, Sergeant.” The other soldiers cheered, Danil grinned skull-like in my father’s face, and my father scowled and, slowly, swallowed. Despite the filth and dust and drying blood on his face, I could see he was pale. My father turned to stare at me. “Do it, scum. Torture me and kill me, I don’t care.”

(Murata was working toward a xeno-linguistics doctorate at Aldera University and gain his teaching license; he survived because he was interning at a pauper school off-world at the time of the Disaster. He joined the Rebellion and finished his doctorate at the clandestine university of New Alderaan. I don’t like him as a person but I admire him very much.)

Chiriak tugged at the point of her lekku for a few moments. “Dawnfire, would you have a problem if we executed him?”

I gasped as if I had been punched. Of course, I was the Butcher’s son. (Is there even an Imperial senior officer with blood on their hands who is _not_ known as Butcher of This or That planet?) Of course they would doubt me, question my loyalty, wish to test it against my bloodline. I was not offended at the idea of shooting my own father, but rather, at the idea that the test was needed in the first place. I defected, I am a Rebel, was it not enough? Will it ever be enough?

Chiriak then said, “I didn’t ask if you would do it. You are a representative of the Alliance Civil Government, so it’s your call to tell us if we should blast this greyback bastard right away or arrest him.”

“Sarge, the kriff you just—” Danil and a few other started to protest, and Chiriak told them to shut the kark up, and to me, “Well then?”

“Let them kill me, traitor,” my father said. “It is what you always wanted, isn’t it?” His face was twitching here and there, one moment the mouth, the next an eye. I’ve seen plenty of sentients make an effort to look brave before danger and death, but that expression was so incongruous on my father’s—on General Veers’ face. Something that did not belong on a man of the Empire, like Naboo royal make-up on Darth Vader’s mask.

I tried to take a deep breath and fake some of that courage, too. “It is what _you_ want, _Captain_ Veers.” I drawled the word _captain_ and he winced in Shikshtanna’s steely, furry grip. “You are not being provocative just because you hate us Rebel scum. You’re trying to make us kill you so you can die a martyr of the Empire and atone for my treason with your life. As I’m sure Lord Vader ordered you to do when he kicked you out of the 501st?”

He worked his jaw as if he were chewing his tongue off inside his mouth and let out a hissing breath through his nose that made his shoulders roll so hard he nearly shook Shikshtanna’s paw off.

I told Chiriak, “He’s our POW. He will have to be interrogated and put on trial. First thing, we bring him to Lieutenant Kew.” The soldiers groaned. Chiriak nodded, neither happy nor angry as far as I could tell; Twi’leks are beautiful but more stony-faced than the galaxy assumes, when they aren’t forced to smile beguilingly for slobbering crime lords and Imperial Moffs.

I crouched and leaned over the edge of the foxhole, close enough to smell the blood and the sweated-out synthwool on my father. He had definitely been wearing that mucky uniform for a while. He tore his gaze away away, so I grabbed a fistful of his hair, sticking out in clammy wisps on the top of his head, and pulled his head to look at me. The ball of my hand pressed against the oily patch of wounded skin. “Don’t think I harbor any compassion for you. I am bringing you alive to the brass solely because I hope they can wring some useful intel out of you.”

“No such luck, boy. I’m just a grunt captain now.”

“And because, unlike you bastards, we don’t shoot prisoners.”

My father made a little humorless chuckle. “Right. You’ll toss me out of an airlock to avenge your dead of Hoth, but after a proper trial, fair and square.”

“I wish they would do so.” I let go of him, my glove and the edge of my jacket sleeve blemished with blood and grime. As I got up I teetered, but a hand gripped my arm and steadied me. It was Chiriak. She said nothing to me, did not look at me, just clasped my arm as she ordered my father—our prisoner—patted down, bound at the wrists, and marched to the hovercraft.

I stood there and gazed down at the foxhole, Chiriak let go of me and ordered everyone to haul arse back to base, we got wounded and a prisoner, I overheard Murata dourly mutter something I did not catch but could perceive by intuition all too well and a Duros guy, ex-smuggler, reply that, well, a haul’s a haul and a prisoner is lighter than scrap iron, and just think, “all Imps who served under Vader, I heard Skywalker interrogates them personally. Just imagine what a Jedi’ll do to him—” and they walked off and I couldn’t hear the rest. It must feel comforting for Murata. I was happy for him. I don’t remember if I was already feeling sick, I remember the words in far crisper details—or I am just better at reimagining them—than the sensations, but I do remember the smell lingering in the foxhole, and I bent over and vomited in it.

They called for me to hurry back up. Our dead were loaded on the hovercraft and covered with the blast-scored tarpaulin that had held the digging tools, while the dead stormtroopers remained where they had been plopped, their slapdash armors a gift for the civilian scavengers, but we took their weapons and ammunition. I walked as far away as I could from my father. For the entire slog we didn’t see each other, so that time in the foxhole has been so far the last time I ever saw my father. I don’t know what became of him after Lieutenant Kew had him frog-marched to the brig, I don’t know who grilled him and what he told or—more likely—refused to tell them, I don’t know if Skywalker used his Jedi tricks to read his mind—I doubt there is much to read in there at all, AT-AT technical specs and Imperial slogans aside—or rip it inside-out like ISB interrogators do with truth serums and torture. Later, I teased the rookie with the cut foot for crying. She told me the prisoner wept throughout the march to our base, without making a noise, not a sob, not a sniffle, just streaming tears.

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for a prompt sent on tumblr. Title is from _Dead Martyrs_ by Manic Street Preachers.
> 
> The line about the older denomination of Zev's job being flagged as "too revolutionary" is a nod to the _représentants en mission_ of the French Revolution, government envoys invested with emergency powers to enforce the laws of the National Convention, oversee conscription and military organisation, and repress uprisings in the provinces. And, in case you were wondering if the SoroSuub Harvester Plant is a reference to the Stalingrad Tractor Plant, the answer is yes.


End file.
